Storage is still one of the most costly and fastest-growing aspects of everyone's network and is likely to remain so for some time. Every network user is a storage user. We're all part of a community that shares the costs and the benefits of this expensive resource. Storage management can be a challenging task. There's so much hardware, so many alternatives, and so many issues that it's easy to get lost in the details and fail to see the forest for the trees.

Networked storage is a service not a product. While hardware is necessary for you to provide the service, successful storage management requires a good customer experience, not expensive hardware. Your users are bound to you and the level of service you provide. They can't purchase a unit of storage and take it home with them, nor can they buy storage from another supplier and install it on your network. So we have to treat our users as a customer of our services, not a customer of some product.

The elements that lead to success in the service business are different from those that lead to success in a product business. In particular, service customers want to be a part of those processes that affect them. They want to participate on an on-going basis with the things that will affect them, and it's this participation that leads them to accept and embrace the outcome they get.

The challenge to us, then, as the managers of storage in a cost-constrained world, is to create a high-touch experience for our end users that keeps them continuously engaged at a price we can afford while safeguarding these same resources. Security is in direct conflict with our desire to service the customer because it's limiting. Striking the balance between customers who are happy with the accessibility of the service (storage) and keeping it safe and available only to authorized users is the key. Any product or policy must be evaluated on how well it serves these competing goals as they each map to your organization's needs.